Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the mechanism of phonological change in progress: Allophonic restructuring of /ae/ in Philadelphia

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The goal of this dissertation project is to deepen our understanding of how language change spreads through a speech community. Language change is a constant and inevitable fact about language: new words, new sound patterns, new syntactic constructions. Because large-scale sound recordings are relatively new, very little is understood about the production and mental representation of sound changes in the minds of individuals who acquire language during a period of phonological change. This project investigates a phonological restructuring currently in progress in Philadelphia, in order to identify the mechanism of phonological change as it propagates through individual speakers in a speech community. The results will form the basis of a science fair exhibit on phonological change in Philadelphia, educating the public on language change and emphasizing the value of linguistic diversity. Phonological change is defined as a change in the abstract representation or allophonic rules governing a phonological segment, to the exclusion of phonetic change, which entails a change in the physical output of a phonological segment. Previous hypotheses have suggested that phonological change occurs as the result of phonetic incrementation (Ohala, 1981), occurs before any phonetic incrementation (Fruehwald, 2013; Janda and Joseph 2003), or through an extension of competing grammars (Kroch, 1989; 2001) to phonological change (Fruehwald et al. 2013). The restructuring of short-a in Philadelphia provides an ideal testing ground for these three theories of phonological change, as it is an ongoing change allowing access to the critical speakers, and as the outputs of both systems provide clear evidence regarding the underlying system. Understanding the mechanism of phonological change within individuals will shed light on the mental representations of language change more broadly. Preliminary findings suggest the operation of two phonological subsystems of short-a within a single speaker, supporting the extension of competing grammars to phonological change and suggesting that categorical linguistic change in both the syntactic and phonological domain may occur through a period of grammar competition within individual speakers.